These days, multiplexes are thick with the smoke of mara-jawana — and it’s coming from the action on the screen. This gave us sort of a cool idea, like, a couple weeks ago, which we promptly forgot. And we just remembered it now: we’re picking the best 16 stoner films of all time — one for every easily weighable segment of an ounce. Disagree with our choices? You’ll hardly harsh our mellow if you e-mail us your favorite marijuana movie.

15) REEFER MADNESS Intended as a scare-’em-straight vehicle, this 1930s travesty is now an ironic classic — it even spawned a 2000’s campy musical.

14) NATIONAL LAMPOON’S ANIMAL HOUSE While John Belushi’s seventh-year senior John Blutarsky dominates the movie, it is Donald Sutherland’s brutally frank and cynical professor Dave Jennings who steals the show — and gets everyone high.

13) PLATOON The bad guys in Oliver Stone’s Nam pic drink booze. The good guys? They blow ganja smoke into each other’s mouths through the chambers of their weapons.

10) TAKING OFF Milos Forman’s alternately sobering and hilarious take on teen delinquincy and middle-class values features a classic scene in which clueless suburban parents get instruction on how to smoke a joint from Vincent “Fast Times” Schiavelli.

9) FRIDAY Two boyz in the hood — one of them Ice Cube — smoke out on their front porch, while trying to scheme up ways to pay back the $200 they owe a dealer.

8) CHEECH AND CHONG A giant joint. A fishbowled car.

7) HOW HIGH Method Man and Redman smoke special herb that helps them ... ace their SATs and get into Harvard. Later, they smoke the corpse of John Quincy Adams.

6) DAZED AND CONFUSED A Texas high school produces, among other memorable characters, a stoner anti-hero: a quarterback who refuses to sign an anti-drug pledge.

5) EASY RIDER With bikes and bud, Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda set the table for buddy movies of the future.

4) RISKY BUSINESS It’s not enough that Tom Cruise makes boatloads of cash by pimping prostitutes — the reason this movie is the ultimate male fantasy is that Rebecca de Mornay utters the immortal lines, “Do you ever get high, Joel?”

3) THE BIG LEBOWSKI The Dude is a Southern California stoner who just wants to bowl — and smoke bowls. That is, until two thugs urinate on his rug.

2) HALF BAKED Dave Chappelle’s homage to herb is hilarious, but he might be upstaged by Jon Stewart cameo, in which he asks “Did you ever see Scent of a Woman...on weeeed?”

1) FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH Jeff Spicoli: “That was my skull! I’m so wasted!”

Following Sean In 1969, when Ralph Arlyck attended San Francisco State, he made a 16mm short about his upstairs neighbor in the Haight: Sean, a free-spirited four-year-old charmer who talked casually of having smoked pot.

A leafy, green substance Just when you thought the “supernaturally large quantity of marijuana” sports bust was a thing of the past.

Yayo for president? Bad news for cokeheads everywhere: the chances of Bolivia becoming for cocaine users what Amsterdam is for pot smokers are slim.

Quotes + numbers - February 3, 2006 4000 pounds of marijuana found inside a 2400-foot-long tunnel that stretched from a warehouse near the Tijuana airport to a warehouse in San Diego.

The new system Dontrelle Williams jumps out to an early lead in the race for newly-minted Annual Crime Champion award.

The Big Hurt: Devil music When I was around 10 years old, I wandered into a rural flea market and found one of the greatest pieces of music journalism ever written: a forgotten crank masterpiece called Backward Masking Unmasked that had been written in 1983 by Texan minister Jacob Aranza.

Killer coke If you follow presidential politics, you know that Barack Obama’s past use of illegal drugs is suddenly a topic of great interest.

Up in smoke In the spring of 2004, Ross Butterworth, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Rhode Island, was hanging out with friends, “puffing a bowl,” in a wooded area behind dorms on the Kingston campus.

HIGH AND LOW CULTURE FROM JAPAN | June 02, 2010 Attention, admirers of quirky kitsch and over-the-top aesthetics: hit PAUSE on that Belle and Sebastian record for a second.

GOING FOR GOLD GLOSSARY | February 17, 2010 The Summer Olympics are fairly easy to comprehend for the average couch tuber: people running, hoisting, swimming in synch — all fairly quotidian activities.

RAINBOW NATION | January 28, 2010 After a torturous history of being treated like second-class citizens, the black population in this country stunned the world by pulling off the unimaginable: voting a black man in as president.

INTERVIEW: OZZY OSBOURNE | January 29, 2010 Long before he bit the heads off bats and doves, Ozzy Osbourne worked in a cheerless abattoir in the hardscrabble Aston section of Birmingham, England, where for 18 months he held such titles as "cow killer," "tripe hanger," "hoof puller," and "pig stunner."